Automated voting systems have long been desired but practical and social objections have largely prevented their widespread use. One of the main objections was eliminated by the advent of digital techniques where absolute accuracy in vote tallying is achieved. The modern mechanical voting machine represents the mechanical version of a digital recorder and processor.
Heretofore, electronic systems have been rejected for a number of reasons. While digital electronic machines have high reliability, they have been known to fail and such failures have been the object of much publicity. Furthermore, the electronic circuits involve a very large component count and therefore have been costly as well as open to the suspicion that the large scale use of electronic circuits is inherently untrustworthy.
The recent emergence of microelectronics and the development of Large Scale Integration (LSI) of electronic circuits has proven that very complex and extensive electronic circuitry can in fact be made cheaply, in very compact form, and capable of great accuracy. The proliferation of pocket calculators of quite complex design demonstrates the capability of digital electronic systems. Presently, micro processors can be obtained in quantity at very low cost. These Devices are actually scaled-down versions of computers with the scaling being done so that any given device can be programmed to perform a relatively wide range of operations. They have proven to be accurate, flexible and reliable and are presently being used in a wide variety of applications.
While electronic voting machines have provided suitable accuracy for voting machine applications, none of the systems proposed have been fully accepted. To be acceptable, such a system must of course be accurate and must be capable of integration into a system that covers a recognized political area. While many proposed systems fulfill these requirements, they are not acceptable because they do not comply with the statutory requirements of the areas they must serve. In addition, any new system must not depart excessively in terms of form, use and appearance from the older system it is to replace. Going from a written ballot to the presently used mechanical machine required a rather large social change and thus proved deceptively difficult to implement. However, that particular change has been accomplished and now there is resistance to evolving to a newer system. Accordingly, any new proposed system desirably will not involve a drastic change in system function and appearance, at least insofar as the voter is concerned.